If you are on the developing trail of your opening AJAX based program, one of the principal challenges that you have to face is to let your users remember not to click on the back button. More often than not, there is a back button predicament in AJAX based programs. Consequently, you may begin to judge that AJAX programs do not have a preference for the back button.

Sorry to say, AJAX does not include the functionality of bookmarking the preceding page so that it could be reloaded anytime. With this development or some people christen it a disability; it is fairly understandable that modern web browsers were built devoid of thinking of the likelihood that a back button might be wiped out in the future. It also goes to demonstrate that AJAX is way bigger than browsers and AJAX will unquestionably be going out of the browser at some point of time. Before you become conscious about those certainties, you have to be acquainted with the fact that there is still a back button. The working of browser will not be over without a back button.

Back button function is an exceptionally competent tool for one and all lacking of which we might find ourselves performing the identical process yet again in preference to just clicking on the back button to do again the process. A back button should be executed even in an AJAX based program. It may echo like a tricky answer to the problem. But the only stumbling block you would face in making possible the back button of your AJAX based application is developing this function for both Mozilla and Internet Explorer web browser. Each of these browsers has their own arrangement, so that the back button could be used at any time.

Internet Explorer necessitates a bit different configuration in comparison to the Mozilla. In this account, it is highly suggested to use Dojo toolkit as they have a library that offers an easy functionality for an AJAX based function. The back button in this toolkit could be easily used. For the most part this library uses many more iFrame so that the webpage and state will be specified. Instead of using # for a more specified function, developers target .src and load the webpage with the previous state. It is also required that a querystring be added that practically imitates the # functionality.

In Mozilla, the first step in enabling the back button is to build a PageLocator function. This code will virtually tell the browser where to go. If the webpage is built on different frames, the developer should specify the actual action to perform on previous action of the browser. However, this code will practically allow you go back to the previous webpage but will nonetheless reload. In a regular web-page such as an HTML based site, you can easily go back to the webpage especially the last state of the page before you left. Page locator will just let you go back and it is just like writing the link again in another browser. To answer this, you have to add another function called setContent. But it does not complete there, you have to add # in the parameters so that you will be accurately at where had to go and save the last state.

Tags: AJAX Navigation Issue